Tag Archives: Ads

Helping publishers bust annoying ads

Cross-posted from The Keyword

At some point, we’ve all been caught off guard by an annoying ad online—like a video automatically playing at full volume, or a pop-up standing in the way to the one thing we’re trying to find. Thanks to research conducted by the Coalition for Better Ads, we now know which ad experiences rank lowest among consumers and are most likely to drive people to install ad blockers.

Ads, good and bad, help fund the open web. But 69% of people who installed ad blockers said they were motivated by annoying or intrusive ads. When ads are blocked, publishers don’t make money.

In June we launched the Ad Experience Report to help publishers understand if their site has ads that violate the Coalition’s Better Ads Standards. In just two months, 140,000 publishers worldwide have viewed the report.

“This report is great for helping publishers adapt to the Better Ads Standards. The level of transparency and data is incredibly actionable. It literally says here’s the issue, here’s how to fix it. I think it will be helpful for all publishers.”
Katya Moukhina, ‎Director of Programmatic Operations, POLITICO

We're already starting to see data trends that can give publishers insights into the most common offending ads. Here's a look at what we know so far.

It's official: Popups are the most annoying ads on the web

Pop-up ads are the most common annoying ads found on publisher sites. On desktop they account for 97% of the violations! These experiences can be bad for business: 50% of users surveyed say they would not revisit or recommend a page that had a pop-up ad.

Instead of pop-ups, publishers can use less disruptive alternatives like full-screen inline ads. They offer the same amount of screen real estate as pop-ups—without covering up any content. Publishers can find more tips and alternatives in our best practices guide.

Mobile and desktop have different issues

On mobile the issues are more varied. Pop-ups account for 54% of issues found, while 21% of issues are due to high ad density: A mobile page flooded with ads takes longer to load, and this makes it harder for people to find what they're looking for.

Most issues come from smaller sites with fewer resources

Our early reporting shows that most issues are not coming from mainstream publishers, like daily newspapers or business publications. They come from smaller sites, who often don’t have the same access to quality control resources as larger publishers.

To help these publishers improve their ads experiences, we review sites daily and record videos of the ad experiences that have been found non-compliant with the Better Ads Standards. If a site is in a “failing” or “warning” state, their Ad Experience Report will include these visuals, along with information about the Better Ad Standards and how the issues may impact their site.

We encourage all publishers to take a look at their report. Here’s how.

  1. Gaining access to the report
    The Ad Experience Report is part of Google Search Console, which means you need to be a verified site owner to access it. You can either ask your webmaster to add you as an owner or user, or verify ownership yourself. Learn more.

  2. Understanding the report
    If your site has been reviewed and the status is “Warning" or "Failing," the report will show videos of the ad experiences that are likely to annoy or mislead your visitors. Click on desktop or mobile reports to see the specific experiences identified.


  3. Fixing the issues and requesting a review
    Once you’ve identified the violating experiences, work with your ad ops and site design teams to remove the annoying experiences. After that, describe how you addressed each of the issues in the ‘Request review’ area and click ‘I fixed this’. You’ll receive a confirmation email saying your review is in progress. Learn more.

Looking ahead

Over the next few weeks we’ll begin notifying sites with issues. For even more insights on the types of sites and violations found, publishers can visit The Ad Experience Report API.

The good news is that people don’t hate all ads—just annoying ones. Replacing annoying ads with more acceptable ones will help ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to sustain their work with online advertising. This is why we support the Coalition’s efforts to develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards and will continue working with them on the standards as they evolve.

Scott Spencer
Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads

Programmatic Native Ads on DoubleClick available to all

When we announced the beta of DoubleClick Native Ads, our goal was to help our partners earn the most money possible with ad experiences that are both engaging and complementary to the user experience. Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of partners deliver beautiful native ads that match the look, feel and function of the surrounding content. And we’ve learned that advertisers are willing to pay more for and users are more likely to engage with native ads compared to traditional ad experiences.

Today we’re happy to announce that all partners on DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) can now deliver native ads programmatically to users across any screen with DoubleClick Native Ads.

Grow your business with native ads

DoubleClick Native Ads provide a dynamic framework for delivering ad experiences that advertisers and users love. Rather than serving a static image or text ad, native ads deliver an engaging user experience by taking multiple creative components — such as a headline, thumbnail and description — and assembling them in real-time to match the style of the site or app.
Partners like the New York Times are using DoubleClick Native Ads to deliver premium standalone ad experiences, increasing CTRs 6X. Accuweather is using native ads to grow programmatic yield on their existing ad placements. In fact, this strategy has improved CPMs 40%, with over 15% of their total impressions won by native-specific demand.

“DoubleClick's native product provides the perfect solution for us to increase CPMs while delivering a mobile experience that is consistent with what users expect from Accuweather,” says Bill McGarry, Vice President of Advertising Sales at Accuweather. “Since implementing DoubleClick Native Ads, we've seen a significant increase in CPMs and we look forward to expanding our investment in native.”

All of DoubleClick, one flexible native solution

With DoubleClick Native Ads, you can deliver beautiful native ads while leveraging the efficiency and scale of a single platform that works across all of your advertising inventory, sales channels and ad formats — whether they’re custom display, video or native ads.

One of DoubleClick’s strengths is the multiple ways it connects buyers and sellers. Whether it’s a Programmatic Guaranteed deal or Private Auction, DoubleClick gives you more ways to work directly with advertisers on high-value transactions — now across all of your native inventory.

We’re also helping you maximize your revenue by allowing these new formats to compete with traditional banner ads. By activating native demand across your existing ad units, you can capture the highest value from a broader group of advertisers competing to serve ads to your audience.

New tools for designing beautiful native ads

Finally, we’ve made it easier for partners to implement DoubleClick Native Ads with the launch of 22 new and customizable native styles in DFP. Though partners can also build custom integrations from scratch, these templates can serve as a great starting point.

The templates take advantage of the many new features we’ve added this year:

  • Ad attribution and AdChoices badges can now overlap the primary image, removing the need to place these elements in a separate row.
  • Additional style targeting options, like devices and negative key values, help you to show the right style at the right time.
  • Better previews make it easier to see how your native style will look while you build it.

We’ve also developed a guide to building great native ads, with advice from Google’s design team and feedback from advertisers about the type of inventory they want to buy, to help you create beautiful and high-performing native ads.

In a world where high-quality ad experiences are more important than ever, DoubleClick Native Ads provide a solution for delivering beautiful and impactful ad experiences efficiently while helping you build thriving and sustainable businesses.

To get started with DoubleClick Native Ads, visit our Help Center or contact your account manager today.

Posted by Aaron Karp
Product Manager, DoubleClick

Delivering more revenue with sustainable advertising solutions

At DoubleClick, we've always had a single mission — to help you grow revenue and build sustainable businesses with advertising. That means ensuring we're helping you make the most revenue from every impression, with solutions that keep up with advertiser demands for more programmatic access to inventory, while at the same time delivering on the expectations of users for great experiences with your sites and apps on every screen. To that end, over the last year we launched products like Optimized Private Auctions, optimized pricing in the Open Auction and DoubleClick for Publishers First Look.

Today, we’d like share some updates on how we’re using the power of automation and machine learning to create sustainable solutions that drive greater advertising performance and revenue for our partners.

Smarter yield through machine learning

Programmatic buying has created many opportunities for publishers to maximize revenue, but optimizing manually puts publishers at a disadvantage when programmatic buyers are constantly investing in smarter bidding technology. That’s why we’ve been applying optimization and machine learning techniques developed over the years at Google to help publishers make more money from programmatic demand. In fact, since 2016 we have run hundreds of experiments resulting in over 50 improvements to our auction algorithms. These optimizations have generated 15% more revenue for publishers using DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Actionable insights with Opportunities & Experiments

Data can be an important input for making better decisions, but the best yield management strategies also include constant testing and measurement. To make this process easier, we recently launched a new Opportunites & Experiments tool that puts publishers in control of Google intelligence.

Publisher opportunities and experiments in DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange provide customized, actionable and quantifiable suggestions on how to increase yield. With a few clicks, publishers can safely run an experiment, and if they like the results, accept the change to apply it across their account. Publishers including The Soul Publishing in Russia, TV2 in Norway, and Match.com in the U.S. have grown revenue with Opportunities and Experiments.

"Opportunities and experiments lets us bypass the heavy, manual labor part of the yield optimization process. It lets us skip straight to projecting results of possible changes and testing a yield hypothesis against a control test group in a safe way. Essentially, the feature helps us find the test cases worth our time automatically, letting us focus on increasing yield and revenue,” says Mikaela Rimaila, Programmatic Manager, TV2. "Personally I’d love to do all my yield optimization through this feature, as it adds a safety layer to rule changes, easily giving us the chance to compare and analyse the effects of the test.”

"Opportunities and experiments in AdX has helped streamline our yield optimization process and boosted our indirect revenue. We receive customized suggestions to increase our yield, such as floor adjustments, and have seen significant gains as a result."
- Gregg Murphy Senior Director, Revenue Operations, Match.com

Bringing Exchange Bidding to more partners demand without compromising user experience

We’ve made a lot of progress since announcing our test of Exchange Bidding last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available for publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers* globally. Exchange Bidding helps publishers bring more of their programmatic demand together into a unified auction and the results have been impressive. On average Exchange Bidding is delivering double-digit programmatic revenue uplift, with some publishers seeing programmatic lift as high as 40% with minimal impact to user experience. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from 7 trusted third party exchanges, including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

Driving sustainability in the future

Looking back at the results from our latest yield management improvements shows us what’s possible, but I think we can do more. We’ve shown how machine learning can deliver more value to publishers, and in the future, we’ll continue to invest in it to deliver even more innovations. Also, the work our teams have been doing on server side technologies have revealed more opportunities to improve publisher revenue by taking advantage of synergies across our products. Publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange may have noticed our first step in this direction, a unified UI for both platforms. Moving forward you should expect more innovations like these to increase publisher yield.

Posted by Jonathan Bellack
Director of Product Management, Publisher Platforms
*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

Announcing Exchange Bidding open beta

When we announced the pilot program for Exchange Bidding last year, our goal was to help publishers earn the most money possible, with the least complexity, while maintaining the best user experience.

We’ve been working on Exchange Bidding in collaboration with our publisher and exchange partners for the last year, and today we’re happy to announce the Open Beta of Exchange Bidding, available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers* globally. Our partners have been seeing great results during our testing, and we’d like to give you more details about this powerful enhancement to DoubleClick for Publishers.

Greater revenue without compromising user experience

When every millisecond counts, the fastest solutions yield the best results. Relying on client side connections over mobile networks to manage yield can result in annoyed users, lower viewability and lost opportunities.

That’s why we challenged ourselves and worked hard to prioritize speed during the closed Beta. To maximize revenue without compromising on user experience, we built Exchange Bidding directly into DoubleClick for Publishers.

The results speak for themselves. Publishers in our closed beta have seen double-digit programmatic revenue lift on average, with some seeing programmatic lift as high as 40%. Plus, Exchange Bidding is up to 15x faster than client side or server side solutions in the market today. While header bidding solutions add on average 500ms to 1,000ms of delay to ad delivery speed, Exchange Bidding adds only 60ms seconds of delay.

Publishers like Hearst Digital are seeing great results.

“Our goal is to move as much of our advertising code off our sites as possible. Less code loading on the client side is better. Exchange Bidding is great because it helps us move in that direction. It’s simple to setup and works with our existing DoubleClick tags.”
- Scott Both, Director of Programmatic Sales Engineering, Hearst Digital Media

Reduced complexity with all demand in one ad tag

Beyond speed and revenue lift, Exchange Bidding creates greater value for publishers by reducing the complexity of their existing yield management setups. Because Exchange Bidding is built into DoubleClick for Publishers, it works with our existing ad tags, requires no additional coding to a publisher’s site or app or additional line items cluttering up a publisher’s ad server, and puts no additional burden on users.

Instead of taking days or weeks of development and adjustments to set up, publishers can get Exchange Bidding up and running in less than a day. Instead of constantly updating the price and priority of partner line items or adding hundreds or thousands of new line items to implement header bidding, publishers simply create a handful of yield groups that define which third party exchanges can bid on specific inventory. And instead of spending days collecting reporting and billing information from multiple partners, reconciling discrepancies, and waiting to get paid, Exchange Bidding provides publishers unified reporting and consolidated billing on our standard terms.

“Integrating and maintaining client side headers is a significant investment for any publisher. Setting up server side bidding with Exchange Bidding was simple. It also helped us reduce a lot of the operational overheads associated with headers and it promises to reduce latencies and discrepancies whilst improving scalability”.
- Nat Poulter, Head of Programmatic at MailOnline

We only succeed when our partners succeed

We understand that in order to help publishers thrive we must foster a sustainable advertising ecosystem. That means creating solutions that deliver the most revenue possible for publishers, while maintaining great experiences for users, and providing all players in the industry equal access to high quality inventory.

To ensure we were getting the right feedback from all parties, we created an advisory board with members from our initial exchange partners. It’s feedback from this group that helped inform the development of Exchange Bidding and make it work better for every participant.

"We've been working with Google on the development of Exchange Bidding for several months now and while it's still early, we are pleased with the level of partnership and transparency we have seen from the Google team. While there are still issues to be resolved and the product is very complex, their efforts have resulted in real and positive changes to the Exchange Bidding product. Based on our experience so far, and the excellent results we have seen to date, we are optimistic that we can deliver material value to our publisher partners via Exchange Bidding."
- Jason Fairchild, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, OpenX

We’ve seen great results during the testing phase of Exchange Bidding. Today, 100+ publishers can choose from seven trusted third party exchanges including our new partners, COMET, OpenX and Sovrn to compete equally in a unified auction against a publisher’s direct sold campaigns in DoubleClick for Publishers and bids from DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We look forward to working with our existing and new users to make Exchange Bidding the best solution for the industry.

Posted by Sam Cox
Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange

*Exchange Bidding is not currently available to publishers using DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business

Young Lions Cracked the Code to Get to This Year’s Cannes Lions Festival Six Seconds at a Time

In a few short weeks, representatives from the world’s top agencies will descend on the south of France for the 64th Annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. In an effort to part of the action, 100 young creatives from across the globe went head-to-head in the inaugural Young Lions Bumper Hack to compete for two coveted spots to this year’s festival, and an opportunity to go on to compete in the Young Lions Film Competition.

This wasn’t any ordinary hack; the brief challenged the next generation of creative talent to tell a story to their future selves. But there was a twist. They had to tell this larger-than-life story using a bite-sized format, YouTube’s :06 bumper ad format. Each entry had to include three :06 films to bring their ideas to life.

YouTube introduced the :06 format last year to help advertisers capture attention in today’s mobile world. Bumpers have shown significant impact when it comes to brand metrics like ad recall1, but creatives wanted to put it to the test to see if six seconds could indeed tell meaningful and emotional stories. So we asked creatives and filmmakers to create for the format at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and SXSW, and they illustrated that bumpers were an untapped creative canvas.

But it was time to give the young guns a crack at it. The Cannes Lions jury carefully reviewed the submissions, which included a wide variety of creative interpretations of the brief, furthering the notion that six seconds is limitless when it comes to storytelling. However, the 2 sets of films that stood out to the jury offered sage advice to the future creatives these youngsters aspire to be. “For me, the best ones were from the creatives who shared a message that extrapolates their own ego, but draws attention to something bigger like giving value to people and the planet, for example,” said Yuri Mussoly, one of the jury members and Digital Creative Director at Africa. “For me, this is the future of advertising.”

That theme was clear throughout the films from Vittorio Perotti of Italy, which were a simple testament to not forget important values as his career progresses. The films, appropriately named “Slap Yourself Now,” highlight the importance of relationships, career and ethics and the necessity to not forget one’s values regardless of success. Perotti explained that “the brief made me think about what I want to be in the future and what I should not forget. I'm afraid to lose some important values in life because people often ignore them when they grow up. If I did the same, I would slap myself.”

               "Slap Yourself Now" by Vittorio Perotti, Designer & Art Director, Sagmeister & Walsh, Italy


The submission from Lance Francisco of the Philippines played on the daily demands that creatives are often faced with and flipped them into a positive mantra to remind him why he set out to be a creative in the first place. “By unlearning these learnings, we can get back to the core of creating again,” said Francisco. And going back to basics is exactly what creating for 6 seconds challenged the young creative to do. “Six seconds forces you to be strikingly simple. It is just enough time for you to give out a clear message and forces you to find a clever way to communicate the message.”

               "Untitled" by Lance Christoper C. Francisco, Art Director, Publicis Jimenezbasic, Philippines


“The two winners stood out for avoiding clichés and for delivering on the brief with punchy typographically driven pieces,” said Chris Clarke, Young Lions juror and Deputy Creative Officer at The Guardian. Perotti and Francisco will will get to heed their advice at Cannes Lions this year as they compete as a team in the Young Lions Film Competition. The winning Bumper Hack films, along with many of the other submissions will be featured at the YouTube Beach during the Festival.

While Perotti’s and Francisco’s films took the grand prize, all of the submissions showed the breadth of creativity that six seconds can offer. Take a look at a few other favorites as we applaud these young creatives and their approach to bite-sized creativity.

                                     "Duck" by Ashley Wilding, Copywriter, CHE Proximity Sydney, Australia


                                 “Brevity Can Stir Your Imagination” by Yukina Oshibe, I&S BBDO, Japan

                 "Start Today" by Tristan Viney, Copywriter & Seamus Fagan, Art Director, Ogilvy, Australia
As the world gravitates toward mobile content, creatives will be challenged with telling big stories through condensed formats. The creative revolution has only just begun; who’s in?

Posted by Noël Paasch, Marketing Manager, Agency Marketing, YouTube



1 In a study of over 600 campaigns, 9 in 10 bumper ads measured globally drove a significant increase in ad recall. Across all campaigns measured, average increase was 38%. (Source: YouTube Internal Data, Global, July 2016)↩

Building a better web for everyone

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.”
- Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Over the past year we’ve lost a substantial portion of revenue to ad blockers across all of our properties. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers in a way we weren’t able to before. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand that adblockers negatively impact our ability to create content for them—you just need a way to start that conversation.”
- Sam Savage, CEO Comicbook.com

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Building a better web for everyone

Cross-posted from The Keyword

The vast majority of online content creators fund their work with advertising. That means they want the ads that run on their sites to be compelling, useful and engaging--ones that people actually want to see and interact with. But the reality is, it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web--like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads--taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.

New tools for publishers

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

“We’ve always put our users first and fully support the Coalition’s Better Ads efforts and standards. At the same time, we deal with so many different websites and ad experiences it’s hard to tell at a glance which ads experiences we need to replace. The report’s videos and screenshots are incredibly helpful and make the Coalition’s research actionable for our teams. We’re impressed with the level of detail and transparency Google is providing and are 200% behind this initiative.”
- Troy Young, President, Hearst Digital Media

As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work. With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.

“Over the past year we’ve lost a substantial portion of revenue to ad blockers across all of our properties. Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers in a way we weren’t able to before. We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand that adblockers negatively impact our ability to create content for them—you just need a way to start that conversation.”
- Sam Savage, CEO Comicbook.com

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year. Publishers should visit our new best practices guide for tips on crafting the right message for their audience.

Chrome support for the Better Ads Standards

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Looking ahead

We believe these changes will ensure all content creators, big and small, can continue to have a sustainable way to fund their work with online advertising.

We look forward to working with the Coalition as they develop marketplace guidelines for supporting the Better Ads Standards, and are committed to working closely with the entire industry—including groups like the IAB, IAB Europe, the WFA, the ANA and the 4A’s, advertisers, agencies and publishers—to roll out these changes in a way that makes sense for users and the broader ads ecosystem.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy
Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

Helping you scale with new tools for customized marketing

At DoubleClick, we're always looking for new ways to help you drive growth and efficiency. This means giving you tools that let you scale and customize your marketing in a way that suits your business needs.

A pain-free bid strategy with Automated Bidding

Scale and customization are critical to effective media buying. But a dependence on manual processes is often painful, especially when you’re running thousands of campaigns. It’s time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

To ease this pain, we’ve rebuilt Automated Bidding from the ground up. Rather than trying to guess the best bidding strategy, you can use Automated Bidding to leverage deep insights informed by Google’s machine learning. You set your bidding strategy to meet campaign goals, such as conversions or viewable impressions, and DoubleClick does the work for you, analyzing dozens of signals to dynamically place bids on the most valuable impressions.

Automated Bidding is now available in all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts.

Flexing to meet your business goals with Custom Algorithm

While Automated Bidding lets you scale your marketing campaigns to meet a number of common goals, many marketers have campaign objectives specific for their business.

We’re introducing Custom Algorithm to address this need. This solution lets you customize the DoubleClick Bid Manager algorithm based on your proprietary data and models. You can assign a value to each impression based on your own unique data, and then Bid Manager automatically optimizes your strategy against those values, rather than clicks or conversions.

Fully customizable to meet any campaign goal, Custom Algorithm offers brands in any industry a way to better drive results using their proprietary data and insights. For instance, a financial services company could customize the algorithm to serve more of their ads to consumers with a high credit score, while a retail advertiser could use their historical purchase data to reach people likely to make high-value purchases.

Custom Algorithm also creates opportunities in more complex scenarios. Google’s internal media buying team used Custom Algorithm for the launch campaign of the Pixel phone. With the aim of optimizing for viewable placements on premium inventory, the team used previous campaign results to build a media buying model to score impressions based on these two factors. They used Custom Algorithm to increase the number of impressions on premium placements, while reducing cost per viewable impression.

They saw great results: Impressions on premium inventory more than tripled and viewable CPM fell 34% when comparing to previous campaigns that didn't use this approach.

Custom Algorithm will launch in limited beta in June 2017 and roll out in full availability towards the end of the year.

Adapting your bids to the user’s context with Bid Multipliers

Automated Bidding and Custom Algorithm are new tools to help marketers automatically set their bids to reach their broader marketing goals. But the most effective bid strategies are ones that align to the user’s context.

For instance, imagine you want to adjust your bids based on the device consumers are using. Right now this process requires you to manually set these bids in separate line items.

We’re aiming to improve your productivity with Bid Multipliers. This new solution lets you set different bids for six dimensions all within the same line item, including device, site, audience lists, demographic, location and time of day. You can also adjust your bids to better reach particular customer segments. For example, if your customers are converting at a higher rate on mobile than desktop, you could shift your strategy to bid higher on mobile campaigns.

We’ll roll out Bid Multipliers to all DoubleClick Bid Manager accounts over the next few months.

We understand the leverage you can gain when we invest in tools that give you greater efficiency and help you scale. With these new solutions, we aim to increase your productivity and empower your team to achieve more impactful results.

Posted by Deepti Bhatnagar
Senior Product Manager, DoubleClick

Introducing Ads Data Hub: Next generation insights and reporting

Mobile has fundamentally changed how we live our lives. With our devices never more than an arm’s length away, people can find, watch or buy anything at anytime. That’s why earlier this year we shared that we’re developing a new, cloud-based measurement solution for YouTube, designed for a mobile world. Today, we’re announcing the beta for this solution, Ads Data Hub, to help advertisers get more detailed insights from their campaigns across screens while also protecting user privacy.

We are also announcing that Ads Data Hub is a solution not just for YouTube, but a tool that offers access to more data and helps unlock actionable insights across Google ad platforms, including the Google Display Network and DoubleClick. And with Ads Data Hub now in beta, we’re expanding who can use it.

Built on infrastructure from Google Cloud, including BigQuery, Ads Data Hub gives advertisers or their preferred measurement partners access to detailed, impression-level data about their media campaigns across devices in a secure, privacy-safe environment. Data from other sources, such as a CRM system or marketing database, can be incorporated as well. With this full view, advertisers or their partners can analyze the data and draw out insights specific to their business.

For example, if an e-commerce retailer wants to understand what the path to conversion looks like, they can bring additional online data about their customers into BigQuery, and Ads Data Hub will enable them to combine that data with their ads data so they can see what a typical journey is from first encountering a user until conversion.

Consistent with our commitment to privacy, no user-level data can be removed from the secure Cloud environment. Impression-level data is only accessible for the purposes of analysis and generating insights. In the future, advertisers will be able to act on the insights they get from Ads Data Hub and buy media with greater precision.

As an early alpha partner, Omnicom Media Group helped to define the solution and has seen significant value from both the amount of data available through Ads Data Hub and the broad set of analyses and custom queries that are possible.

"With the complexity of today's consumer journeys, we are seeing that marketers are looking to solve harder business challenges than ever before. Through our partnership with Google and our use of Ads Data Hub, we will be able to answer a broader range of questions and expand our analytical services."
- Slavi Samardzija, Global CEO, Annalect, An Omnicom Media Group Company

With the shift to mobile, consumer behavior has changed for good. Marketers need tools to help them make sense of this new world, and Ads Data Hub is a key step forward.

Posted by Geoff Samek
Senior Product Manager, Ads Data and Privacy

Making marketing easier with new tools for productivity

Making marketing easier with new tools for productivity

Mobile continues to raise the bar for marketers - as consumers increasingly reach for their smartphones to get things done, they expect fast and frictionless assistance. And to help them in these moments with more useful and personalized ads, you need scalable, easy-to-use tools that allow you to manage your marketing in smarter ways.

This morning at Google Marketing Next, we shared the next generation of AdWords, DoubleClick and Google Analytics tools, each of them shaped by your feedback and built to help you work as productively and efficiently as possible.

Below is a round-up!

The new AdWords experience will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year

The new AdWords experience marks the most powerful change we’ve made to how advertisers visualize and manage their campaigns in over 15 years. The redesign makes AdWords significantly easier to use to help you reach your unique marketing goals and get things done.

Earlier this year, we previewed a few of the new tools and features in the new AdWords experience. This includes the new Overview page, which automatically surfaces relevant insights about your performance so you can take action more quickly.

Here are some other new things to check out:

Campaign creation
Build campaigns designed around your marketing goals

Performance estimates
View performance estimates to help plan your display campaigns
Landing page report
See how your landing pages are affecting campaign performance
Since rolling out the new AdWords experience, we’ve seen some inspiring results. We see that pages load much faster -- on average, 20% faster. Customers like iProspect North also reported that the new design and layout saves them 30% more time when completing everyday tasks. Starting today, we’re rolling out the new experience to millions of additional AdWords accounts and it will be available to all advertisers by the end of the year. Get started by reviewing our Best Practice guide.

Better together: Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 integrate with AdWords

Your marketing workflows should be seamless and integrated, from managing media to optimizing your site and collecting performance insights. This allows you to easily apply learnings from one step to another and take action faster. With new integrations for Google Optimize and Google Surveys 360 with AdWords, you'll be able to test landing pages and gain insights about your ads more efficiently.

Available globally to all advertisers at no cost, Optimize helps marketers test and deliver custom site experiences to improve performance. With the Optimize and AdWords integration, you can quickly and easily create new versions of your landing pages and then apply them to any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – no coding or webmaster required. For example, on a summer beachwear campaign, test whether a landing page that features an image of beachgoers performs better than one that showcases your latest swimsuit styles. Optimize will figure out which variation works best for your business and help you get more value from your AdWords campaigns.

Surveys 360 makes it easy for anyone to create a survey, find a specific audience sample across the web, and generate results in just a few days. With the Surveys 360 and AdWords integration, you can easily target surveys to people in your remarketing audiences to help you understand the “why” behind how consumers react to your marketing. For example, ask customers what they thought was the most compelling part of your ad. Or, if you want to know what customers thought of the landing pages you tested on your summer beachwear campaign, quickly launch a survey and ask site visitors what stood out to them on the page.

Smarter planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager

The programmatic revolution has focused on combining data, machine learning and automation to drive better performance. However, few of these benefits have carried over to the world of media planning. To help save you time and improve performance, we’re bringing the power of machine learning to campaign planning with a new workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Bid Manager uses machine learning to analyze your past campaigns and understand what's performed well for you before. With these insights, it will recommend the right inventory and targeting to reach your audience based on your unique marketing goals. The result is an optimized media plan tailored to your business, which you can then tweak, approve and activate with one click.
New workflow in DoubleClick Bid Manager
“Planning in DoubleClick Bid Manager helps us find the right inventory and strategies in a matter of seconds. Now we can invest even more time in understanding our audience rather than how we should reach them.”
- Louise Lévesque, Vice-President, Marketing & Sponsorship, National Bank of Canada

Unique Reach arrives for AdWords Display campaigns and DoubleClick

Once your ads are up and running, you want to know how many people are seeing them. Reach and frequency are hallmark metrics to measure the impact of display and video campaigns today. At the same time, you need to be thoughtful about how often you connect with a single user to avoid overloading them. 30% of people today use 5 or more devices1 - that means if you reach someone three times on each screen, you could be showing them fifteen ads!

We launched Unique Reach for YouTube in AdWords earlier this year and are soon expanding availability to Display campaigns in AdWords. We’re also bringing Unique Reach to DoubleClick for all your video and display ads, no matter where they run. Unique Reach helps you measure the number of unique users and average impressions-per-user you get from video and display ads. Metrics are de-duplicated across devices, campaigns, inventory and formats so you can see how many people you reached and how often you reach them.

We can’t wait to get these new tools into your hands to hear what you think and help you work faster and smarter. To get the full replay of new innovations at Google Marketing Next, watch the keynote here.

Until next year!
Posted by Paul Muret
Vice President of Display, Video and Analytics, Google
1 Google / TNS Connected Consumer Survey, US population 18+, n=1000, Q1 2016